The first thing you need to know is that you never need to compile for ARMv7: after all, apps last updated at the time of the iPhone 3G (and thus compiled for ARMv6) still run on the iPad 2 (provided they didn’t use private APIs…).

Scratch that, you may have to compile for ARMv7 in some circumstances: I have heard reports that if your app requires iOS 5, then Xcode won’t let you build the app ARMv6 only. – May 22, 2012

So you could keep compiling your app for ARMv6, but is it what you should do? It depends on your situation.

If your app is an iPad-only app, or if it requires a device feature (like video recording or magnetometer) that no ARMv6 device ever had, then do not hesitate and compile only for ARMv7. There are only benefits and no drawback to doing so (just make sure to add armv7 in the Required Device Capabilities (UIRequiredDeviceCapabilities) key in the project’s Info.plist, otherwise you will get a validation error from iTunes Connect when uploading the binary, such as: “iPhone/iPod Touch: application executable is missing a required architecture. At least one of the following architecture(s) must be present: armv6”).

If you still want your app to run on ARMv6 devices, however, you can’t go ARMv7-only, so your only choices are to compile only for ARMv6, or for both ARMv6 and ARMv7, which generates a fat binary which will still run on ARMv6 devices while taking advantage of the new instructions on ARMv7 devices1. Doing the latter will almost double the executable binary size compared to the former; executable binary size is typically dwarfed by the art assets and other resources in your application package, so it typically doesn’t matter, but make sure to check this increase. In exchange, you will get the following:

ability to use NEON (note that you will not automatically get NEON-optimized code from the compiler, you must explicitly write that code)

Thumb that doesn’t suck: if you follow my advice and disable Thumb for ARMv6 but enable it for ARMv7, this means your code on ARMv7 will be smaller than on ARMv6, helping with RAM and instruction cache usage

slightly more efficient compiler-generated code (ARMv7 brings a few new instructions besides NEON).

Given the tradeoff, even if you don’t take advantage of NEON it’s almost always a good idea to compile for both ARMv6 and ARMv7 rather than just ARMv6, but again make sure to check the size increase of the application package isn’t a problem.

Now I think it is important to mention what compiling for ARMv7 will not bring you.

It will not make your code run more efficiently on ARMv6 devices, since those will still be running the ARMv6 compiled code; this means it will only improve your code on devices where your app already runs faster. That being said, you could take advantage of these improvements to, say, enable more effects on ARMv7 devices.

It will not improve performance of the Apple frameworks and libraries: those are already optimized for the device they are running on, even if your code is compiled only for ARMv6.

There are a few cases where ARMv7 devices run code less efficiently than ARMv6 ones (double-precision floating-point code comes to mind); this will happen on these devices even if you only compile for ARMv6, so adding (or replacing by) an ARMv7 slice will not help or hurt this in any way.

If you have third-party dependencies with libraries that provide only an ARMv6 slice (you can check with otool -vf <library name>), the code of this dependency won’t become more efficient if you compile for ARMv7 (if they do provide an ARMv7 slice, compiling for ARMv7 will allow you to use it, likely making it more efficient).

So to sum it up: you should likely compile for both ARMv6 and ARMv7, which will improve your code somewhat (or significantly if you take advantage of NEON) but only when running on ARMv7 devices, while increasing your application download to a likely small extent; unless, that is, if you only target ARMv7 devices, in which case you can drop compiling for ARMv6 and eliminate that drawback.

Apple would very much like you to optimize for ARMv7 while keeping ARMv6 compatibility: at the time of this writing, the default “Standard” architecture setting in Xcode compiles for both ARMv6 and ARMv7.↩